'The first qualification for admittance is that they must find something new to say every day,' she said to the Duc de Béthune, who was in an informal way her first chamberlain. 'The second is, that they must always amuse me.'
'The first clause a few might perhaps fulfil; but who shall attain to fulfilment of the second?'
'That will remain to be seen,' she said with a little yawn, while she reclined on the white furs and the Eastern tissues, her feet on a silver globe of hot water and her hands clasped idly on a tortoiseshell field-glass. It was five o'clock; the western sky was a burning vault of rose and gold; the zenith had the deep divine blue that is like nothing else in all creation; the sea was radiant, purple here, azure there, opal elsewhere, as the light fell on it; delicate winds blew across it violet-scented from the land; the afternoon sun was warm, and as its light deepened made the pale rose of the marbles glow like the flowers of a pomegranate tree. She forgot her companions; she leaned her head against her cushions and dreamily thought of many things; of the day she had first come thither most of all. It had been nine years before.
Nine years!—what an eternity! She remembered the bouquet which Othmar had given her on the head of the sea-stairs. What a lover he had been!—a lover out of a romance—Lelio, Ruy Blas, Romeo—anything you would. What a pity to have married him! It had been commonplace, banal, stupid—anybody would have done it. There had been a complete absence of originality in such a conclusion to their story.
If Laura had married Petrarca, who would have cared for the sonnets?
She laughed a little as she thought so. Her companions hoped they had succeeded in amusing her. She had not heard a word they were saying. She gazed dreamily at the sea through her eyelids, which looked shut, and pursued her own reflections.
Her companions of the moment were all men; the most notable of them were Melville, the Duc de Béthune, and a Russian, Loris Loswa.
Melville, on the wing between Rome and Paris, loitered a week or two in Nice, doing his best to shake alms for good works out of the sinners there, and lifting up the silver clarion of his voice against the curse of the tripot with unsparing denunciation.
The Duc de Béthune was there because for twelve years of his still young life he had been uneasy whenever many miles were between him and the face of his lady, whom he adored with the hopeless and chivalrous passion of which he had sustained the defence at the Court of Love at Amyôt. He would have carried her muff or her ribbon to the scaffold, like d'Aubiac and Montmorin, whom he had cited there. He had been almost the only one of her lovers whom she had deigned to take the trouble to preserve as a friend. He had been inspired at first sight with an intense passion for her, which had coloured and embittered some of the best years of his life. On the death of Napraxine he had been amongst the first to lay the offer of his life at her feet. She had rejected him, but without her customary mockery, even with a certain regret; and she had employed all the infinite power of her charms and tact of her intelligence to retain him as a companion whilst rejecting him as a suitor. Such a position had seemed at first impossible to him, and had been long painful; but at last he chose rather to see her on those distant terms than never, and gradually, as time passed on, he grew familiarised to the sight of her as the wife of Othmar, and the love he bore to her softened into regard, and lost its sting and its torment.
In person he was handsome and distinguished-looking to a great degree; he resembled the portrait of Henri Quatre, and bore himself like the fine soldier he was; he had a grave temperament and a romantic fancy; the cradle of his race was a vast dark fortress overhanging the iron-bound rocks of Finisterre, and his early manhood had been ushered in by the terrible tragedies of the année terrible. As volunteer with the Army of the North, Gui de Béthune had seen the darkest side of war and life; he had been but a mere youth then, but the misfortunes of his country had added to the natural seriousness of his northern temper. The most elegant of gentlemen in the great world of Paris, he yet had never abandoned himself as utterly as most men of his age and rank to the empire of pleasure; there was a certain reserve and dignity in him which became the cast of his features and the gravity and sweetness of his voice.